Clive Donner (1976)
Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, first published in May 1939, has been adapted twice for the screen: in Man Hunt, a Hollywood film of 1941, directed by Fritz Lang; subsequently in this Clive Donner version, made for television and first screened on BBC in September 1976. It was shown at the following year’s Toronto Film Festival and, says Wikipedia, ‘was regarded by the BBC as being suitable for a cinema release internationally’. The reason this didn’t happen, according to the same source, was that it ‘had the potential to cause legal and industrial problems in the UK, because the crew had not been paid at the rate applicable to cinema releases’. Now Donner’s film has been produced as a BFI DVD and issued as the latest quarterly DVD freebie for BFI Champion members, which is how I came by it.
Household’s protagonist is an Englishman, a sportsman and a gentleman. While travelling on the continent, he visits a country governed by a totalitarian regime, tracks down its dictator, and gets him in the sights of his rifle. He tells himself he has sought out the potential quarry for the thrill of the chase and without intending to pull the trigger. Members of the regime’s secret service, after arresting the Englishman, torture him, throw him from a cliff and leave him for dead. He survives and, with the help of a civilian who is also a good sport, escapes to a seaport. He stows away on a British ship and returns to England. In London, he realises the dictator’s men are still on his trail. He kills one of them, following a chase on the London underground, then finds himself pursued not only by the remaining agents but also by the British police for murder. He goes underground again – literally so, in a hide in rural Dorset. With time to reflect, he admits to himself that he did mean, as revenge for the execution of his fiancée by the totalitarian regime, to assassinate the dictator. The protagonist now constructs a makeshift catapult with which, from within the bolt hole, he kills his chief pursuer – a compatriot in cahoots with the foreign dictatorship. The hero takes this fifth columnist’s car, money and identification papers, drives to Liverpool and boards a ship bound for Tangier. He begins to plan a second stalk of the dictator.
Reviewing the new DVD of Rogue Male in Sight & Sound (March 2019), Robert Hanks situates Geoffrey Household’s novel within a strain of adventure-thriller fiction of the interwar period. Household, says Hanks, ‘shares with [Eric] Ambler a distaste for fascism and an outraged sense that sides must be taken, and with [John] Buchan a deep Toryism and passion for the English countryside, not just as landscape but as the basis for a quasi-feudal social order whose passing is to be deplored’. (Wikipedia’s biographical summary of Household endorses this interpretation, at least in the information that ‘After the [Second World] War, he lived the life of a country gentleman’.) The English traitor in the novel is called Quive-Smith but the hero, the foreign country and its dictator are all unnamed. In an interview with Radio Times for the broadcast of Donner’s film in 1976, Household was quoted as follows:
‘Although the idea for Rogue Male germinated from my intense dislike of Hitler, I did not actually name him in the book as things were a bit tricky at the time and I thought I would leave it open so that the target could be either Hitler or Stalin. You could take your pick.’
To say ‘things were a bit tricky at the time’ is quite an understatement. Even with a nameless arch-enemy, the novel seems, in retrospect, an urgent and a daring piece of work – published, as it was, only a few months before Britain was at war with Germany.
Retrospect is perhaps the fundamental problem with Clive Donner’s disappointing film of the book. Distance in time lends smugness to the view. Frederic Raphael’s script includes an explanation of the novel’s title (a rogue male elephant separates from the herd and roams viciously alone); Household’s other animal and man-as-beast metaphors (going to ground, running to earth, etc) remain salient. Yet the film often seems set in quotation marks, with a surfeit of caricatural acting and music by Christopher Gunning that suggests not just pastiche but tongue-in-cheek pastiche. Even though the story is still eventful and moderately exciting, the screenplay undersells the source material’s ripping yarn aspect in favour of skewering the English class system.
The apparent casting coup was getting Peter O’Toole for the lead – the hunted huntsman, now called … Sir Robert Hunter. O’Toole’s aristocratic accent is amusing for a while and he does inventive things – though maybe that should be overdoes. You get the increasing impression that his priority is to deliver lines quirkily, even if that means losing the sense of them. Overall, O’Toole is so individual that it’s hard to get a handle on how unconventional Hunter is meant to be, and well nigh impossible to see him as representative of a type. Although he has competitors in the cast, the star takes the prize for looking most out of period thanks to overlong hair. You’re bound to wonder if Peter O’Toole refused a trim and Clive Donner was too grateful to have him to argue.
The real casting coup is Alastair Sim because this proved to be his last performance: he died a few weeks before the transmission of Rogue Male. He plays ‘the Earl’, Hunter’s uncle, whose vague manner belies a clear understanding of his own best interests. The Earl starts off a firm supporter of Neville Chamberlain; by the end, he’s a Churchill man through and through. It isn’t vintage Sim but his natural eccentricity serves him well, enabling him to avoid the deliberate lampooning style of, for example, John Standing as Quive-Smith and Harold Pinter as Hunter’s lawyer.
It might have helped to give the audience its bearings by briefly introducing the protagonist in England, taking pleasure on the hunting field in easier times. As it is, Donner and Raphael launch straight into the main action. Place and time are announced as ‘Germany, Early 1939’. The dark corpses of birds crash to the ground in close-up and the men bringing them down are Germans. Ashen-faced Hunter isn’t part of the shoot but watches on the edge of woodland, some distance from the sounds of gunfire. When we next see him, he’s training his rifle on a social gathering that includes Hitler. The juxtaposition of sequences shows Hunter as a marksman on a mission but fails to imply he’s a man who got to know a gun by shooting for ‘sport’.
It’s all the more frustrating that the film doesn’t set Hunter in his natural environment when it does rely on flashbacks to his doomed romance with Rebecca (Cyd Hyman). These inserts are so feeble they’re spoof-like – they don’t have anything like the weight to suggest that the memory of Rebecca and what Nazi Germany did to her is what impels Hunter to action. The historical circumstances inevitably point up the Jewish flavour of the name Rebecca, which naturally makes you wonder if Sir Robert Hunter is not just anti-fascist but sufficiently free of the prejudices of his class and era to fall in love with a Jewess. It seems an important point but it’s one that the director and screenwriter, Jewish themselves, don’t trouble to explore further.
6 May 2019
